THE RENTBOY LEGAL MESS

[Electra225]

Gentlemen:

 

I've been reading up on this case for a number of days now. I read and re-read the original complaint and did research (Lexus/Nexus). This, to me, is clearly a First Amendment issue. Does anyone know if the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been contacted and, if so, what are their thoughts and positions on this case? If they have not been contacted, who, in New York, should contact them?

 

Unfortunately, if this case does revolve around the First Amendment, the fight is going to be long, hard, and very tough--not to mention expensive. One hopeful light is that during the pre-trial process in the federal system, there will be an opportunity to present a First Amendment argument before the district and appellate court and the whole thing can be made to go away (one would hope).

 

Unfortunately, again, the Rentboy entity (as a company) is probably dead. What will hopefully happen is that the owners, managers, and employees will find a way to regroup, rebrand, and reopen with a level of service and expertise that will work for everyone. If that happens, it will also take money--quite a bit of it. I think that this is an enterprise that would garner financial support from those of us who are involved in this "hobby" as either a client or a provider. If offered, and the business plan was sound, I would definitely be interested in being an investor (one of many--my sugar daddy days are over).

 

Your thoughts??????

[bostonman]

Unfortunately, again, the Rentboy entity (as a company) is probably dead. What will hopefully happen is that the owners, managers, and employees will find a way to regroup, rebrand, and reopen with a level of service and expertise that will work for everyone.

 

One thing I think we can say with some certainty - the internet world is resilient. I would not be surprised at all to see a new site formed at some point in the near future. By who, and with what funds, I don't know, but I wouldn't doubt it will happen.

 

Last year, a very popular file-sharing site (not escort related, something in the music world) was forced to shut down under pressure from people in the industry. (I don't know how far this went into legal proceedings - I tend to think the owner voluntarily caved.) Well, the exact same site is now up once again, under a new name. Rentboy may not follow that path exactly, but I'm sure we'll see something.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Does anyone know if the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been contacted and, if so, what are their thoughts and positions on this case? If they have not been contacted, who, in New York, should contact them?

 

I posted this same article in a thread I just started on the organizing/political end of this. It is the first time I've seen reference to the ACLU since the raid. The ACLU's comments are spot on, but other than that I don't have a clue how involved they are or will be:

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/gay-activists-protest-rentboy-raid-1441327676

 

Assuming this is a thread about legal strategy, I'll make some indirect comments on that, that really have to do more with public opinion. We just won a huge legal battle on same sex marriage. To me, the single best explanation of how we won is captured by the chart in this article:

 

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

 

Between 2001 and 2015, there has been a complete reversal of public opinion on the issue. We went from 57/35 against to 55/39 for same sex marriage. How much of the change was driven by legal victories, and how much of it is that the changes in opinion drove the legal victories, is a very complicated question. I've posted this before, but to me it is an article worth poring over because it captures the lessons we learned:

 

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595464-what-victorious-gay-marriage-campaigners-can-teach-others-heads-and-hearts

 

Heads we lose, hearts we win. Inherent in that is that a set of highly rational, legalistic arguments may not work as well as personal stories that move people at the emotional level. The other thing I'd highlight as a lesson is that with marriage we got better and better at finding ways to let voters feel they could accept what we wanted within their current value system, instead of having to change their values, or change marriage. We just wanted the same as they did. I personally don't think the courts would have come around if we hadn't brought public opinion around first.

 

On decriminalization, I think anyone who thinks we will win this in court anytime soon is being very optimistic, certainly absent a massive organizing and messaging campaign. The good news to me is that if the issue is whether it makes sense to crack down on Internet sites like Rentboy that linked, for example, a 21 year old college student trying to pay his tuition with an adult Gay man wanting to hire him, even the Wall Street Journal makes mostly libertarian sounding arguments that don't really evoke the sense that we're part of a "global criminal enterprise." The bad news is that whether you call it "decriminalization" or anything else, 40 years of public opinion polls don't seem to offer much reason to think time is on our side:

 

http://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000121

 

I'd say this data is next to worthless, because it is old or anecdotal or both. Nevertheless, there are some things that jump out at me.

 

First, the word "decriminalization" itself is confusing and only partly accurate. One of the times we came closest (42/58) was in SF in 2008. Voters were asked to stop enforcing laws regarding prostitution, but to enforce (arguably, more aggressively) criminal laws against battery or rape of sex workers. So is that decriminalization, or targeted enforcement?

 

In the shorter term, I think our best argument is that enforcement of existing laws should be targeted to real victims and real violence. Nobody is arguing that there are either victims or violence involved in the Rentboy case. Put differently, Rentboy enjoyed de facto decriminalization for almost two decades, until DHS set about to brand Gays who use it as part of their so-called "global criminal enterprise." The polling seems to indicate that public support for "decriminalization" goes up when it is tied to concepts like "regulation" or "control."

 

Second, while very dated, the thing that really jumps out at me about the one national survey I could find, which breaks out by gender and age and income, is that young people are as likely, and even a little more likely, to oppose decriminalization than older people. Women are overwhelmingly against it: 87 to 13 back in 1995, according to this data. Anecdotally, some of the most emotionally vibrant articles I've read on the "con" side were written by professional women journalists who clearly viewed the whole concept of having to sell your body for sex as abhorrent. All of this is exactly opposite of most poll results on same sex marriage, where younger people, male or female, are way more likely to support marriage equality.

 

I think we have a "values" gap, especially among women. My guess, though I have no data to prove it other than this, is that this includes not only women who are politically similar to Sarah Palin, but also a lot of women who are politically similar to Chelsea Clinton --- feminists. I certainly know this to be true based on my personal "coming out" experience. I can't think of one liberal woman I know who was anything other than warm and receptive when I came out to them as a gay man. And yet every time I've come out to a liberal woman as a male escort, it kind of freaked them out, at least at first.

 

Back to the courts, it was a no brainer that Justices like Ruther Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would be on our side on marriage equality. With this issue, I'm actually not so sure.

[+ jrhoutex]

Gentlemen:

 

.... Does anyone know if the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been contacted and, if so, what are their thoughts and positions on this case? If they have not been contacted, who, in New York, should contact them?

 

Here is an article from the ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/when-are-consensual-sexual-relationships-threat-national-security?page=2#comments-top

[Michael Wayne]

Here is what disturbs me: the governments' power to shut down a website or an operation WITHOUT a conviction!!!! The arrest powers are OUT OF CONTROL. RB and its' owner/ employees have NOT been convicted of any crimes whatsoever and with a simple criminal complaint and so called probable cause affidavit they can shut down a business?? This is NOT AMERICA...... it is NAZI GERMANY. SO, hell yes, bring on the ACLU and anyone else who will help. Our criminal justice system is about one thing: STEALING money from businessmen who provide a valuable and necessary service. UNCLE SAM wants his cut and in Rentboys' case ALL of it! TO my knowledge there has not even been a formal indictment here......let alone a conviction. They arrest you and blackmail you....extorting you to pay the bail or the bond. This is the very definition of corruption and thus our freedom in a so called free society is just an illusion................ anyway biz goes on and WE NEED Daddy and his very LEGAL forum now more than ever. We escorts need yall long time forum members to step up to the plate and speak out now more than ever before. This case would be a good reason for some of you who have quit hiring to hire again....occasionally and selectively cause we could use the business..... Me, personally, I always did better @ www.men4rentnow.com and @ www.rentmen.com than on rentboy BUT I have several friends in the biz who had all their advertising money with rentboy and they are really hurting right now and could use some good appointments! Mikey in DC

[+ stevenkesslar]

I know I'm coming in from left field, but I wanted to find a book I've read and cite it to reinforce what I wrote above.

 

My main point is that we just spent several decades figuring out that while winning in court absolutely depends on legalistic arguments that appeal to the head, those arguments and messages may be less effective outside the court room. I think this is doubly true on this issue, since words like "prostitution" conjure up images like sex slavery, battery, rape. DHS and NY law enforcement were quite aware of this when they wrote their press release. Even the laws we promote, like the decriminalization law voted down in San Francisco when I lived there in 2008, appropriately used words like battery and rape.

 

The enticingly titled book I was looking for was "Sex Secrets of Escorts," written by Veronica Monet. It's the best book on escorting I have ever read. Ms. Monet refers to herself as a "sex educator," among other things. Last time I checked, sex education was not an illegal activity anywhere.

 

Here are a few lines from her 278 book: "You want to be careful to pick color and fabrics with which your man will feel comfortable ... In fact, one client paid to redecorate and refurnish my apartment because he intended to spend a lot of time there, and he wanted to surround himself with opulence." These are not the words of a victim. My guess is Ms. Monet could have been an interior decorator, a realtor, or many things. The way she describes what she did and why she did it is, I think, accessible to the values of a lot of professional people, particularly women, who could view what she did as a path to empowerment and financial success, as opposed to rape or violence. I can base this on personal experience, because when I came out as a "male escort" to a straight woman who is a leading LGBT rights activist, these are exactly the examples I used, and they resonated. While they were not choices she would make, she got that there was really no crime in other women (or men) making those choices.

 

The worst thing you can say about Ms. Monet is that she is part of an elite of educated women, and that at the opposite end of the spectrum are women who are in fact victims of violence and intimidation. It is a complicated picture. But being an educated woman, or man, is not a crime.

 

In the case of Gay marriage, it worked out well for us, as a legal argument, that we could make a values-based argument that "we are all in this together." It will be harder to make an argument like that relating to prostitution, because the experience is so broad, from Ms. Monet to victims of sex trafficking. That also gives us an opportunity, because on the face of it it doesn't really make common sense to throw everybody in one category and simply label it a "global criminal enterprise." That's what the Department of Homeland Security just did to Gay men, and it ain't cutting so far.

[+ stevenkesslar]

I know I am in VD (verbal diarrhea) mode, but here are 3 other important articles that relate to my point about the court of law versus the court of public opinion:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/supreme-court-embraces-equality/2015/06/26/1efbd34a-1a2b-11e5-bd7f-4611a60dd8e5_story.html

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/solving-prostitution/2015/08/16/a95bbb3c-41f8-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html

 

In the first case, The Washington Post is endorsing the Supreme Court's decision in favor of marriage "equality." In the second, the Post is opposing Amnesty International's call to decriminalize prostitution.

 

On the face of it, I would argue this ought to give all of us pause. If we can't win today in the court of public opinion with The Washington Post, it raises serious questions in my mind about how this will go in court. The Post editorial on marriage makes some of these points. It notes that Chief Justice Roberts noted in siding with the minority that “Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens — through the democratic process — to adopt their view.” The editorial plays on this, noting in the headline that the ruling in effect allows the law to "catch up" with America. On a basic values question of fairness and equality, the Post is defining LGBTQ folks and America as being on the same side, with common values.

 

In the case of prostitution, it's the exact opposite. The Post's editorial is thoughtful in weighing some of the pros and cons. But the headline, "Solving Prostitution," mostly contradicts a later statement: "Prostitution and human trafficking will never be stamped out." Implicitly, by equating prostitution with trafficking and presenting it as something to be "solved," the Post is weighing in on the side of saying that this is more like the world's oldest problem than the world's oldest profession. The main argument the Post presents against "wholesale decriminalization" is that it is not a way to solve a problem, because it would "protect the very people who cause it."

 

As they say, the evidence from countries like Germany and The Netherlands suggest that decriminalization led to increased prostitution as well as increased trafficking. To me, it's kind of hard to argue that "wholesale decriminalization" would not increase demand. The case for whether the Nordic model - cracking down on johns - actually reduces demand is weaker. I see no value in pretending that I speak Swedish or understand much of anything about Sweden, but the only report I can find that cites actual numbers of arrests for prostitution and sex trafficking, by the Swedish National Council For Crime Prevention, seems to suggest that demand there has not gone down in any measurable way:

 

http://factsaresacred.ie/politics/has-demand-for-prostitution-declined-in-sweden/

 

If anything, the numbers from Sweden reinforce that the Post is right, and prostitution and sex trafficking will never be stamped out. The Post editorial was printed on August 16, not very long before the Department of Homeland Security stamped out Rentboy.com. Immediately, it threw Gay men into a debate that is primarily about women and kids, by labeling us with all kinds of negative words, as part of a "global criminal enterprise." To me, that gives us a huge opportunity to refocus the discussion in a way that emphasizes common values and reaches out to natural allies.

 

I posted an article I found by Lamda Legal in a separate thread. Here is another one I just found. Same, excellent arguments, all based on a set of very good core values, which in this case also includes the National Center for Transgender Equality.

 

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rentboycom-raid-shows-why-we-need-decriminalize-sex-work

 

If you can, watch the opposing perspective as well, a video about a father and son pimp. Like the reporter, I would agree that what these two men did is abhorrent, and an affront to the dignity of the women they victimized and to the values of human dignity.

 

Here's a news flash to the Department of Homeland Security. I know a number of male rentboys that use the money they earn escorting not only to take care of themselves - like by paying their tuition and rent. They also use it to take care of their mothers and families, like by paying for their medical and dental expenses, or their niece's college, or their sister's HIV medications. How can you even remotely compare this to what Vincent George Sr. and Vincent George Jr. did?

 

This may prove to be a huge political miscalculation on the part of DHS. The narrative against "wholesale decriminalization" depends on men being presented as sexual predators who prey on women and children. They are the victims, and we have depraved values. On the face of it, Rentboy.com had nothing to do with that. And the more the people that used Rentboy and this website speak out, the clearer it will become that it actually served as a tool to empower, educate, and prevent abuse among the adult men that used it.

 

Whether you call it "targeted decriminalization" or "targeted enforcement" or "defacto decriminalization," the kind of law that received serious consideration in San Francisco in 2008 would likely have allowed Rentboy.com to operate, but also allowed the cops to bust the father and son pimps that anybody decent would agree needed to be stopped and brought to justice.

 

Few of us are lawyers. All of us are decent men that actually use this site to express and debate ideas based on a good set of core human values. We are exactly the people that need to engage this debate, and this is exactly the right time.